Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness.

Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.